The Journals of John Cheever (Vintage International) (3 page)

•

Is there anything more wonderful than the Monday morning train: the 8:22? The weekend—say a long summer weekend like the Fourth—has left you rested. There have been picnics, fireworks, excursions to the beach—all the pleasant things we do together. On Sunday we had cocktails late and a pickup supper in the garden. We see the darkness end the weekend without any regret—it has all been so pleasant. In the garden we can hear, from the west, the noise of traffic on the parkway rise to a high pitch that it will hold until nearly midnight, as other families drive back to the city from the mountains or the shore; and the sleeping children, the clothing hung in the backseat, the infinity of headlights—the sense we take from these overcrowded Sunday roads of a gigantic evacuation, a gigantic pilgrimage—is all a part of this hour. You water the grass, tell the children a story, take a bath, and get into bed. The morning is brilliant and fresh. Your wife drives you to the train in the convertible. The children and the dog come along. From
the minute you wake up you seem to be on the verge of an irrepressible joy. The drive down Alewives Lane to the station seems triumphal, and when you see the station below you and the trees and the few people who have already gathered there, waiting in the morning sun, and when you kiss your wife and your children goodbye and give the dog’s ears a scratch and say good morning all around the platform and unfold the
Tribune
and hear the train, the 8:22, coming down the tracks, it seems to me a wonderful thing.

•

Concerned over my brother. A man who conveys a feeling of deep perplexity. Things have not turned out the way he meant them to. The way he speaks and looks, the mind that strikes almost always idly or in self-defense, the way he pares his fingernails and wipes his mouth on his sleeve, the bullish hang of his head—everything about him expresses deep perplexity and suspicion. He pares his nails because he suspects refinement and delicacy, or is reacting against some unrewarded delicacy in himself. Sullen, contradictory, and laconic. I am troubled because he is my brother and because he has for years been the man of the family. Now all these transformations have left him incompetent.

•

She is Mrs. Fuzzy-Wig; she is the nonconformist. She lives in a little house on a back street and paints lampshades. Her five children are married and scattered, and she does not want to visit them at all. They dread the time when she will become so infirm—she is in her eighties—that she will be forced to live with them. But they do not dread it nearly as much as she does. I will not go to live with them—she thinks, of her children; I will die before I go to live with them. I will die. Now she is obsessed with impressing onto every surface that she touches the image of a rose. The hall carpet—all the carpets—represent roses. The hall is papered with a galaxy of bloodred roses that are all as big as lettuce heads. The effect is confusing. But you are not through with roses in the hall. Every chair and stool and sofa in the living room is covered with cloth that is stamped with roses. Here they are bigger—they are as big as cabbages, and those on the chair seats are repeated in the wallpaper, just as big but of a slightly fainter shade of red. Step into the dining room, and the situation is the same.
There are roses on the bedroom carpet, roses on the bedspread, roses on the wall, and roses have been painted on the pin tray, the lampshades, the wastebasket, and the matchbox. It is with things like these last that she is now occupied; there are still plenty of surfaces in the house that lack a rose. She has covered all of the lampshades and many of the chair backs, but there are still plenty of cannisters, boxes, etc. that present bare surfaces. She is very happy.

Below the surface I see the nonconformist. In a sense this is admirable. Here is independence, and yet all her children, looking to her for the graceful discharge of affection, have been rudely discouraged. She has arbitrarily, now and then, laid claim to their affections. She taught poor Eben to bake, sew, and generally conduct himself like a young girl, and in a small town today you can see their kind; the boy of twelve, the effeminate youth, clutching his mother’s arm as they cross the street from the corset store to the millinery store. All of this is past for them and yet, because she did not conform at all, they will all, for the rest of their lives, laugh uproariously when they see a woman of her kind slip on a banana peel—with that unhealthy mixture of tenderness and loathing that she has implanted in them.

After I had driven all day through a tiring light, there was the restless night in Quincy, the smell of smoke. Then a breakfast with the umbilical cord seeming to have been cut but to lie, ragged and bleeding, on the table between us.

    Driving down the road yesterday, I saw a long snake. I stopped the car, and J. and I got out. Incidentally, I behaved like a fool, but enough of this. The snake was marked with brown saddles. Instead of taking off into the woods, it coiled to strike, and raised and vibrated its tail like a rattler, although it had no rattle. I mangled its head with a rock. J., picking up another rock, finished it. I am not, like poor D., afraid of snakes, but I am interested in the hold they have on the imagination. This green shire is supposed to be free of snakes. A few things depend upon a snake. The cook, I think, would leave. There are the children, P.’s cow, etc.

•

Back down into the country, the valley of the commuters. Train smoke, bells, women driving over to Harmon to meet the 6:00; eat you
supper and water the grass. The empty house did not disturb me, but this is a usable premonition of death. The evening clothes in the closet, the pile of toys upstairs, the shelves of glass and china; the warmth of ownership, of life, has gone off all these things; these are all ghostly things now.

•

The usual fracas in trying to go to sleep; but some of this violence has been overcome by age. I can remember walking around the streets of New York on a summer night some years ago. I cannot say that it was like the pain of living death; it never had that clear a meaning. But it was torment, crushing torment and frustration. I was caught under the weight of some great door. The feeling always was that if I could express myself erotically I would come alive. Then I stopped in a bar where a pleasant and foolish man engaged me in conversation and told me that his father had, for years, been superintendent of the hospital on Welfare Island. Then the crushing weight was lifted; it was merely a summer night in the city. I put this down because I think it all belongs to the past. Most of the aberrations seem to belong to the past.

•

The cook goes into town on Thursday, but on Friday morning, when you come down for breakfast, there is no sign of life in the kitchen. When you knock on her door no one answers, and when you open the door you examine the room with a practiced eye.

The photograph of her brother is gone. You throw open the closet door. The hangers are all empty. They are stirred by the draft from the open door, and they ring like tin bells. You see a pair of her shoes in the corner, but you can see the floor through the worn soles. She has gone. An empty sherry bottle lies on its side.

•

We drove to the Vineyard on a day when the light was hazy and brilliant, a tiring light to drive in. It was after Labor Day but there were still many people travelling, still many people with their clothes hung in the back of the car. Late in the day the sun was warm; then, approaching the canal, we ran into a sea turn. A salt fog obscured everything. We missed the five-o’clock boat and walked around the streets, the foggy streets. Piano music from a bar. “I’ll get by as long
as I have you.…” Boat whistles, sirens, delays. It was dark when we boarded the boat. Susie was timid. But as soon as we got into the harbor a wind scattered the fog and we saw the moon, the lights of West Chop. Over the dark roads to the house: talk; I went swimming in the sea. I met J.H. walking on the beach. His engagement was broken and he had received his induction notice. To bed, the noise of the sea.

I walked up the beach before breakfast. To write about my response to this landscape with the greatest honesty. The hills, the scrub growth, as yellow now as it was green, the black roofs of the bathhouse—all these lines remind one of Japanese drawings. The hills seem barely to have risen from the sea; although this is not the case. This is a falling coastline. The old man who died the year before last claimed to remember a meadow where there is deep water now. Across the Sound the cliffs of Naushon are ragged where they have fallen, bit by bit, into the sea. The stones where you walk are strangely colored. The multitude of forms confounds you and makes you happy. A hundred yards inland there is a spiral shell with a spiderweb spun over the mouth. The rocks offshore—the tide is ebbing—are half covered with beards of gold-green weed. Here is a shell like a smashed ball with a pink core. The line, the crooked and the changing line, marked by sea grass and grocery crates, ships’ booms and a broken tiller, this endless line is the one of death’s countless images that seems to hold no terror, or very little, for here is change, here is recrudescence and decay—the air stinks of it, the noise of it sounds most of the time. And then on the other hand you sit by the side of the sea and drink gin, you smoke, you gossip, you talk too much and to no purpose, you take off your shoes and walk up and down the floor of the world, thinking about bad debts, tuition bills, and overdrafts.

•

Last night to see the Tennessee Williams play, “A Streetcar Named Desire.” As decadent, I think, as anything I’ve ever seen on the stage, with gin-mill or whorehouse jazz in the dark between the scenes, a cellist playing during the play, a rhinestone, a torn evening dress, a crown, a homosexual, a beast, insanity, crimes, dim lights, tinsel flowers, and the cellist playing a lewd ballad. At the same time, Williams gives the theme some universality, and, having taken a daughter of joy, he makes her seem, without irony, to possess a pure heart. There is much else; the wonderful sense of captivity in a squalid apartment an
of the beauty of the evening, although most of the chords struck seem to lie close to insanity. Anxiety, that is—confinement, and so forth. Also, he avoids not only the common clichés but the uncommon cliché, over which I so often trip, and also works in a form that has few inhibitions and has written its own laws.

Hearing yesterday from Marion Shaw that Irwin is writing seventeen pages a day troubled me, and I will refrain from writing here this morning the things I’ve written in this notebook for fifteen years about writing a novel. Maybe I can finish the Sutton Place story tomorrow.

To write well, to write passionately, to be less inhibited, to be warmer, to be more self-critical, to recognize the power of as well as the force of lust, to write, to love.

•

May 4th, my son Benjamin was born. My splendid, my forgiving, my gentle wife. Both of us caught up on a tide of stronger circumstance. In the hospital the lamps blooming in the linoleum floor. The delicate lights of the distant amusement park; the city; the highway. The sense that one’s heart and watch are nearly stopped. And Mary’s talk of the universal subconscious, the illusions of gas and ether, the parched taste, the coronas and ridges of fire. The uprush of human greatness that answers to charity and pain. Holiness. The remote neighborhoods of the city—the hospitals, graveyards, and wharves—that we forget. The day that you were born I broke a bottle of bay rum on the bathroom floor. The night before I’d taken your mother to hear Maggie Teyte.

•

Very pleased and excited by Mailer’s book “The Naked and the Dead.” Impressed particularly with its size. Despaired, while reading it, of my own confined talents. I seem, with my autumn roses and my winter twilights, not to be in the big league. Particularly impressed with his description of one man, an Italian, watching Red, an old soldier, and thinking first, This man is comical; then, This man is brave and knowing; then that this man is stupid, reflecting perfectly, clearly a responsive and immature spirit.

   Knowing at last that the smell of birch in a Franklin stove is not everything. The morning returns to me my self-confidence and all my limitations. Eccentric I must be, gentle, soft in some ways, broodin,
subjective, forced to consider my prose by the ignobility of some of my material.

•

The park on a Sunday night. The light withdrawing from the sky and the life on the walks darkening and intensifying. The unrelieved sexuality of the experience. Small breasts in the streetlight; breasts held in a black dress so the crease shows. Young men travelling in pairs, in threes, whooping, wrestling in the grass. The round lights blooming, the shapes of the trees, the shapes and lights of venery itself. And the music, the much-used, the ill-used music, music that had been played through rainsqualls and thunderstorms, music to which people had eaten in restaurants and on park benches, music used to swell a climax in a radio play or to bring to their resolution the terrible problems of a movie; music played in high-school auditoriums with that smell of radiators, played from memorial bandstands in India, Italy, New Hampshire … At a turning of the path, the fragrance of a garden. The strong sense of youth, although many here are old; the innocent lusts.

•

We are as poor as we ever have been. The rent is not paid, we have very little to eat, relatively little to eat: canned tongue and eggs. We have many bills. I can write a story a week, perhaps more. I’ve tried this before and never succeeded, and I will try again.

•

New York-Quincy—New Haven—New York. I took a plane late Thursday morning. This casual sense of travel, of writing about it easily, garrulously. The taxi, the delayed plane, a Martini and a roast-beef sandwich in the Commodore or Longchamps, the dark half-empty news-reel theatre, the gray-and-white refugees that have for so long been marching across its screen, the bus to the airport and the plane itself, hot and decorated for some reason like a bedroom, the place names on its window curtains. The revved motors, the instantaneous charm slums achieve when they have fallen a thousand feet beneath your wings, the sense that the small plane remained earthbound and overburdened and remained a few thousand feet above Long Island only because of the greatest exertion of its motors. A storm at the edge of the afternoo,
like a fire in heaven, the smoke of which was blown down from the clouds and spread over the earth, the dimness of smoke. That Boston from the air seemed to have an Irish complexion …